Football Governance Bill [HL]

Lord Moynihan of Chelsea Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Tuesday 15th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grantchester (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend the Minister and commend the excellent work of her officials in her department’s Bill team on the amendments returned from the Commons that clarify and tidy provisions in the Bill. I congratulate them especially on where the Bill has been strengthened; this version is much improved from the previous Government’s drafting. I declare an interest from my past experiences, involvement, responsibilities and connections with Everton Football Club.

While transparency has been improved by these amendments, I am grateful that the exaggerated perils claimed from the Opposition Benches have continued to be resisted. These proposals will bring a more amicable resolution of the backstop. I am confident that the Bill will prove effective in including parachute payments within the remit of the regulator, as, without their inclusion, the regulator’s ability to view the financial stability and resilience of the whole football pyramid would be substantially impaired.

These amendments will reduce the risk and uncertainty in the backstop mechanism. A light touch does not signify a lack of application in maintaining vigilance across the pyramid, especially down through the leagues, where the predominance of more maverick owners has tended to congregate. However, there are other features that must be mentioned. That the regulator is fully independent of government should reassure all fans, especially now that the regulator is no longer required to consider government policies on trade and international markets. Fans will expect a rigid level playing field between clubs to be scrupulously maintained and will be encouraged that fan representatives will be democratically endorsed independently from their clubs. Meaningful engagement of fans will ensure that the heritage provisions of the Bill will not be undermined.

I too welcome the appointment of David Kogan as the first football regulator. Although he is yet to take up his post officially, it is imperative that the work begins and that swift progress is made on the state of the game report—the next milestone in this legislation’s effectiveness. May I tempt my noble friend the Minister to confirm that David Kogan has already been able to identify his team and is already drawing up proposals to begin the necessary processes to start immediately on Royal Assent?

[Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)]

My Lords, despite the very kind words of my noble friend the senior Lord Moynihan, and indeed of the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, I understand that we have to be careful in declaring our interests. I declare myself a season ticket holder of the Club World Cup champions of the world, whose games I have been attending since 1958—a time when many noble Lords were not even alive.

As we enter what we might call the final minutes of extra time on this Bill, it would certainly be churlish of me not to repeat the words of my noble friend Lord Maude about the Minister’s very careful and kind attention throughout this Bill, and the improvements that have been made as this Bill has come back from the Commons. But somebody must stand up and say that there is an opinion that can be heard in this House that a regulator is a really bad idea for this sector.

In saying that, I accept that it was our side, scoring, as you might say, an own goal, who started all of this. I hope that, if ever we come to power again, we have leaders who do not say, “There go the people, I must follow them”, but who think rather longer-term, not about how football fans respond to artfully constructed opinion polls but how football fans will react to the depredations of this regulator, however well-intended and good—and everybody on all sides has applauded the selection of the regulator—that will make this sector worse, and possibly very bad.

Why do we have this regulator? Because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, mentioned, Bolton football club took some risks, went bust and got relegated. Is Bolton football club no longer? Has it now vanished? Oh, no, it is still around. For those who are not massively enamoured of or conversant with the world of business—it appears that most of the Cabinet is comprised of those who have never been involved in business—it may come as a surprise to know that this is how business works. You take risks and sometimes you go bust, then you get re-formed, as Bolton football club did, and you carry on, with the same fans and the same ground. They are in a lower division but can fight back and get re-elected to higher divisions.

[Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)]

Time is late, so I do not want to go through the whole history of Bolton Wanderers, but the noble Lord’s facts are not quite correct. What we are concentrating on here is that all clubs should have a better business approach to football and not just rely on wealthy local individuals or people who come along and buy up a club. We need a fit and proper persons test. That is the kind of progress we will be making. We need to make sure that, all through the pyramid, there is a better business approach to football. That is what the new regulator will help create.

[Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness. It is a pity we are discussing football and not chess, where maybe the clock would have been stopped to give me the time I would need in view of that lengthy interruption. The noble Baroness has made my point. In life, one takes risks. The fact that we have in this country the best football in the world is because enormous risks were taken in setting up the Premier League, and it has been enormously successful.

The noble Baroness was basically saying, “We know best and, to impose our view of how it should be—the non-commercial view—we will have a regulator. By the way, when we have the regulator, we will impose all sorts of little baubles on the Christmas tree”, as we discussed earlier in these debates. One example was EDI. She was basically saying, “We will impose EDI on all football clubs. Just as that pernicious doctrine is fading away, we’re going to impose it”. The Labour Party—God bless—won an election and has the right to impose these Bills. I am merely warning about what will happen.

I wrote to the Minister, who very kindly responded at length. The Labour Government often pray in aid the McKinsey studies on how EDI is a jolly good thing and leads to better organisations. I wrote to her pointing out that the McKinsey work has been completely discredited. She kindly wrote back to me saying, “Yes, I agree that the McKinsey work has been discredited, but many other studies have not been discredited and show that EDI is a jolly good thing”. So I called one of the most senior people at McKinsey and said, “Your studies have all been discredited, haven’t they?”. He said yes. I said, “Well, people are saying that there are many other studies that support the EDI idea”. He said, “There aren’t any. We’ve looked for them. They aren’t there”. The Minister did not give me examples—she may have examples, but she did not give me any in the letter—of anything but the utterly discredited McKinsey idea of EDI. That is just one example of the kind of baubles that have been put on this Christmas tree and that will make things worse in our industry.

It is indeed late, as noble Baroness said, and I will try to wrap up. We do not know best; the market knows best. The market has produced one of the most extraordinarily successful industries that we have in this country. We are going to try to take the market away and impose on it all sorts of rules. I am here just to put down a marker—

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

I point out to the noble Lord, who lauds the market, that an important part of the impetus for the Bill was that a number of Premier League clubs were going to exercise market forces to break away and destroy the Premier League.

[Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)]

The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, is absolutely correct—and what happened? Within a few days, all that went away. They had a look and it went away. As I mentioned, I wrote an article on the very day the idea came out, as did many other people, saying that it would not work. The clubs involved looked at that and said, “Yes, this is true. It’s not going to work”.

The noble Lord talked about Wimbledon. We are now saying, in the Bill, that clubs cannot move and there can be no dynamism. Yet I quoted a study in the debate last night that said that, when we restrict, clamp down and prevent things happening, that is when societies disintegrate. We cannot expect to have success if we say, “We know best and we’re going to stop this, that and the other, and impose this, that and the other”. I am just putting a warning down: one of these days, somebody will be in a position to say that this was an extraordinarily bad idea.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I will say a couple of words to wrap up from these Benches. When we did the Bill, my first comment was, “I am not of your tribe when it comes to being a football fan”. I encourage everybody to watch a decent sport on Saturday morning, when the Lions have their first Test, but we have got that out of the way now. The thing about this is that football clearly touches people’s lives because it is their local team. What the Bill does is get better management and better structures in there. It means that somebody is overseeing them.

It may be that the market will ultimately do something or run away, or we will all end up playing ice hockey on artificial pitches or something when people get fed up with it. Who knows? But at the moment, football speaks to many communities, and the fact that we will have these clubs, which are a part of the fabric of their local society and its interaction together, surviving better, or at least standing a chance of so doing, is something for which we should actually be very grateful.

In the end, the argument about these amendments is probably over how we divide up the loot. Let us face it, we did this because bits of football were fighting with each other about money; that is where we got to at the end. The Cross Benches came up with a solution that was, I felt, a little too elegant—that congratulation is really what I felt the whole time—as opposed to a rather brutal solution by the Government. We went brutal. But we have something here that looks like it will work and have general agreement.